Juuni Kokki: The Twelve Kingdoms

I’m currently reading Thousand Leagues of Wind: The Sky at Dawn by Fuyumi Ono.

I first encountered it when I watched the anime some half a dozen years ago. A recent re-watch brought back a lot of my previous impressions of the anime. Namely that it was a spectacularly intricate and well thought out plot invested with rich world building, consistent internal mechanics and politics, with some interesting characters managing these complicated mechanics of the world at large. However, it also had some annoying and vaguely out of joint elements such as the character of Asano. It wasn’t until recently that I read up on the matter and found that Juuni Kokki was a novel series by Fuyumi Ono and that it was recently published in English by Tokyo Pop. Hrm, I thought, that’s interesting. It would certainly explain why the character of Asano never really fit in with the rest of the events and characters of the story. That’s how anime adaptations generally are with these complex light novel or novel works.